Weekend Box Office: ’Rampage’ Tramples ‘A Quiet Place’

Despite a strong second-week showing from John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place, the video-game adaptation Rampage was the number one movie in the country over the weekend, grossing an estimated $34.5 million. Here’s the full box office chart:

Film

Weekend

Per Screen

Total

1

Rampage

$34,500,000

$8,413

$34,500,000

2

A Quiet Place

$32,600,000 (-35%)

$9,083

$99,635,885

3

Truth or Dare

$19,080,000

$6,299

$19,080,000

4

Ready Player One

$11,205,000 (-54%)

$3,061

$114,607,798

5

Blockers

$10,295,000 (-50%)

$3,012

$36,927,670

6

Black Panther

$5,342,000 (-38%)

$2,450

$673,797,522

7

Isle of Dogs

$5,000,000 (+9%)

$2,579

$18,450,864

8

I Can Only Imagine

$3,837,220 (-50%)

$1,503

$74,988,485

9

Tyler Perry’s Acrimony

$3,700,000 (-55%)

$2,778

$37,875,477

10

Chappaquiddick

$3,025,000 (-47%)

$1,839

$11,006,383

Rampage is another solid opening for Dwayne Johnson; back in December, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle opened to nearly identical numbers ($36.1 million) and that had the nostalgia factor of the original film to boost its ticket sales. Rampage, about a couple of giant monsters trashing Chicago, really just had an old game not many people remember plus Johnson’s star power and enormous muscles to pull it through. Jumanji became a huge word-of-mouth hit, and while it seems doubtful Rampage will top out with $400 million in theaters, it did earn an A- CinemaScore, so audiences seemed to like the film.

Johnson and his big monster buds barely snuck past the runner-up for the weekend, A Quiet Place, the surprise hit horror film about a family on the run from (not big) monsters. The movie, starring Krasinski and Emily Blunt, dropped just 35 percent weekend to weekend; after 10 days of release, it’s already made $100 million, a very good start for a small-scale horror movie from an unproven director. The high-concept is bringing people in, and they’re liking what they’re seeing and/or not hearing.

A Quiet Place held well enough that the new horror movie of the weekend, Truth or Dare, based on the two abstract concepts (or the children’s party game, whatever), debuted in third place on the box office chart. It grossed an estimated $19 million, which makes it a middle-of-the-road opening for producer Jason Blum; it’s slightly ahead of films like Sinister and Unfriended, but behind films like The Visit, Ouija, and the Insidious, Purge, and Paranormal Activity franchises. The movie’s CinemaScore was a not-great B-. Rounding out the top five was Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One, which is now Spielberg’s biggest movie since Lincoln, and the teen comedy Blockers, which is slowly creeping toward $50 million in domestic grosses.

Surrounded by some very big movies, a very small film had the best per-screen average of the weekend. The Rider, a sensitive indie about a rodeo rider, grossed $45,268 on three screens around the country, for an impressive PSA of $15,089. Even though Rampage was the top movie of the weekend, the second-best PSA still belonged to A Quiet Place, which was playing on fewer screens than Rampage and earned $9,083 per screen.